The woman who abandoned her baby at a Queens church was caught on video moments before she left the child in the parish’s nativity scene — but although she has now been identified, she won’t face criminal charges, officials said Wednesday.

Cradling the newborn in her arms, the young woman can be seen in surveillance footage from a nearby 99 Cent Store as she walks down Jamaica Avenue and enters the shop at around 12:55 p.m. Monday. She peruses the shelves and picks up what appears to be the purple towel she used to wrap up the baby boy before leaving him in the crèche that had been set up inside the Holy Child Jesus Church in Richmond Hills.

After paying, the woman grabs her bag and leaves. She would later abandon the baby and make off without being seen.

The mother has been interviewed by officials, and won’t be prosecuted after a determination was made that she had “followed the spirit of New York’s ‘Safe Haven’ Law,’” Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said Wednesday night.

The law allows a parent to leave a baby with an appropriate person or in an appropriate location, Brown explained.

“It appears that the mother, in this case, felt her newborn child would be found safely in the church and chose to place the baby in the manger because it was the warmest place in the church,” Brown said in a statement.

The custodian who found the infant had been on a break and wasn’t inside the church when the woman left the child there.

But the mother also returned the next morning to make certain the baby had been found, Brown said.

The abandoned baby found in the manger at Holy Child Jesus Church in Richmond Hill.

Christopher Ryan Heanue

A custodian discovered the baby at the Queens church on Monday.

Christopher Ryan Heanue

EMTs at the scene where a newborn baby was found in a church Nativity scene.

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Geraldine Walsh, 50, a school nurse who works at Holy Child Jesus Catholic Academy, was one of the first people who treated the infant after he was discovered later that day.

“At first I thought they were joking,” she recalled, describing how she got a call from the church across the street from her school.

“But when they told me it was a newborn with the umbilical cord, I realized this was serious,” Walsh said.

“I had all these things going through my head. Is the baby blue? Is the baby breathing?”

When she reached the infant, Walsh acted quickly.

“I had to tie the umbilical cord,” she said.

“The mother must’ve just clipped it. There was some blood oozing out of it. There was blood everywhere.”

The store clerk who rang up the woman on Monday said he mistook her for a shoplifter at first — on account of the anxious way she was behaving. “I was watching her on the camera,” the worker said, decling to give his name.

“She entered the store and went to aisle one, then turn left to aisle six, where she picked up the [towel],” he said. “She then went to aisle 8, then to aisle 6 and then 3 before she went to pay. She didn’t pick up anything else so I don’t know why she went to the other aisles,” he said.

The woman appeared to be in her 20s, he said.

The clerk said he couldn’t even tell the woman was holding a child when she entered the store.

“The baby was covered with the jackets and I couldn’t see it,” he said. “The baby never made a sound.”